AMD announces broad vendor support for Barcelona

Though AMD has yet to release Barcelona, they are doing everything they can to talk it up. They have a lot of incentive to do such, as their market share has been slipping back to Intel, including where it hurts the most, in the server market. There are rumors that September 10th will be the day of actual release.

In the meantime, however, they are announcing that they already have broad vendor support for their as of yet unreleased quad core baby. Cooperating with Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Vmware, AMD says their new CPU will have optimizations already provided from many vendors:

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that leading x86 operating system (OS) and virtual infrastructure (VI) vendors are embracing support for AMDs native Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, code-named Barcelona. Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and VMware are optimizing their operating systems, virtual infrastructures and supporting tools and middleware to take full advantage of the increased efficiencies, performance and decreased power consumption enabled by AMD quad-core technology. They go on to detail how each company has contributed, and compiled a list of supported server operating systems that are optimized for Barcelona's new architecture. Come September 10th we'll see if the latest rumors are true, and hopefully they will be. It would be nice to see AMD back in a fighting position with Intel.